I agree with firstPerson. However, I'm confused as to why this function marches along initializing some of the array members and then stops. You are asking it to "get" an element but returning a whole array. Unless you are doing some error checking that isn't evident in your code why wouldn't you use arr[row][col]? I'm just puzzled is all....

After initializing that array, it will be filled with data from a file (numrow in the actual program is computed from the file itself instead of a parameter of the function), and then returns that array.

and since this function needs to be general enough to take any files thats in a tabula form...so...it'd be neat if I can return a 2-d array